Beyond Tragedy: Maman, pas l’hôpital! by Jeanne-Marie Préfaut
August 21, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Maman, pas l’hôpital! is Jeanne-Marie Préfaut’s account of her autistic daughter Sophie’s life, and of how Préfaut took her daughter’s life by giving her an overdose of pills in August of 1994.
Maman, pas l’hôpital! is a painful book to read. Since it is about an autistic child there is much that is familiar to me—Sophie’s endlessly repetitive language, her periods of silence, her aggressive behaviors, her difficulties sleeping, her being soothed by long car rides. But there is even more that is not familiar to my own experience raising an autistic child, and not only the book’s terrible ending.
Sophie is not diagnosed with autism until she is 8 years old. She is treated almost exclusively by psychiatrists and given doses of more and more kinds of medications that are more and more powerful, and, perhaps, damaging to her body. She is sent briefly to a school as a child and then to various special institutions but never truly educated.
It seems more than a cruel irony that Sophie’s name is from the ancient Greek word for “wisdom,” sophia. The errors made in her treatment as chronicled in Maman, pas l’hôpital! are beyond tragic and emphasize to me how important it is to educate Charlie, to teach him because he can be taught.
As, I think, Sophie could have been, too.
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Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] I do not doubt that it was not easy to take care of Sophie. It has not been easy to take care of my own autistic son, Charlie—-and taking care of Charlie has been the hardest, and the best thingm I have done and will ever do. What astounds me in reading Maman, pas l’hôpital! is, as I noted in an earliest post, the sheer lack of attempts to teach Sophie, in Préfaut’s account. Sophie was found to be able to read and write; what attempts were made to help toilet train her? Préfaut writes constantly of chasing after Sophie running away, of driving an agitated Sophie endlessly and aimlessly in the car to soothe her; what attempts were made to teach Sophie coping mechanisms—such as attending to her sensory needs and helping to increase her communication skills through speech therapy? [...]